The Sciences at Mount Holyoke
The College has played a remarkable role in producing women scientists since its
founding.1 For most of the last century, Mount Holyoke graduated more women who went on to
receive doctorates in the physical sciences and engineering than any other college in the nation;
only Cornell and Berkeley graduated more women who would go on to receive doctorates in the
life sciences. A NSF study in 2009 (the last study available with this level of detail) of doctorate
recipients by baccalaureate institution illustrates our continuing success in producing leading
women scientists: between 1966 and 2006, Mount Holyoke ranked sixth among all selective
liberal arts colleges in producing women who went on to receive US Ph.D.s in the life sciences
(378 Ph.D.s) and eleventh in the life and physical sciences combined (489 Ph.D.s in all). Among
selective liberal arts colleges, Mount Holyoke ranked first in graduating minority women who
went on to receive doctorates (38 total) in life and physical sciences from 1997 to 2006 and, in
the same period, we produced more international female graduates who went on to receive US
doctorates in the physical and life sciences (28 total) than any other college or university in the
country.2
Mount Holyoke is particularly well-suited to develop model curricula in crossdisciplinary areas. During the past fifteen years, we have invested in an exceptional group of
young science faculty: twenty-eight (61%) of our forty-six tenure-track and tenured science and
mathematics faculty have been appointed since 1998. Twenty-eight (61%) of our science and
math faculty are women; twelve (26%) are persons of color. Since 2000, Mount Holyoke’s
science faculty have been awarded over $15.4M in NSF grants. We have had eight NSF
CAREER award winners and two recipients of Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientist
and Engineers, the most prestigious federal government award for young scientists. Additionally,
one of our newest faculty members is the recipient of the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award.
Many of these faculty have strong interdisciplinary interests, resulting in a culture in which
faculty regularly collaborate on cross-disciplinary curricular initiatives and develop research
projects involving students from different departments.
Collaborative research among faculty and students is a critical element of the academic
culture at Mount Holyoke, providing students with outstanding mentoring and access to
sophisticated scientific instrumentation and techniques that few undergraduates experience. A
quarter of our students currently major in science or mathematics – double the proportion of
women who typically major in math or science at comparable co-educational institutions. A
majority of our science majors spend their summers doing independent research, and most
majors write senior theses based on research with faculty. Our summer research programs attract
75-80 undergraduates a year; over a quarter of them students of color. Over two decades, these
efforts have received generous assistance from government agencies and foundations, including
NSF, NIH, NASA, the Clare Boothe Luce Fund, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the
Sherman Fairchild and Dreyfus foundations.
See Miriam R. Levin, Defining Women’s Scientific Enterprise: Mount Holyoke Faculty and the Rise of American
Science (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2005).
2 National Science Foundation, Division of Science Resources Statistics. (2009). Characteristics of Doctoral
Scientists and Engineers in the United States: 2006. Detailed Statistical Tables NSF 09-317. Arlington, VA.
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Updated 1/24/2014